Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Updated Kramb, Replacement Level Story Telling

Kramb is a measurement for starting players on the Columbus Crew. It adds team Points per Game (PPG) earned while player is starting with his Goal Differential (GD) whilst on the pitch (similar to a +/- type metric that the NBA likes to mess around with).

Above is my preferred way to look at how a player is contributing. It's not perfect but it gives you a great idea of who is contributing and who is not. That said, I ran across something last year that was odd with the Crew and it came by way of schedule difficulty (magnified with unbalanced schedule). As 2012 rolled along it became clear that certain players were trotted out against harder clubs. Makes sense, of course, that you try and play your better players against hard teams but this wasn't always the case with the team last year (more on that in future posts).

Are there some ways to incorporate schedule difficulty into the KRAMB number? I think so.

One way I like, is to take replacement level type view on each category KRAMB looks at and then add one more; Average Opponent Difficulty. We'll call it AOD.

*I've put an astrisk next to some of the players to point out that they jump way up when taking opponent difficulty in to account.

Something else I found very interesting is that the guys at the bottom who don't have enough starts yet in order to be considered. All of them are ridiculously high numbers. There is a story to be told here.

How exactly does this tell a story?

Well, the Crew started the year off with an easier level of competition but as things progressed the schedule got slightly harder. As they tend to do, injuries started to pile up as well. This meant that the Crew had to put non-first team-ers into the starting line up. The increased level of competition drives players like Gehrig, Sanchez, Barson and Meram way high and, in turn, driven some of the other players down.

Barson, for example, has a loss and a draw (0.50 PPG) on his record to go along with his -1.50 GD. Not looking good there but take in to consideration his opponent level in those two games; Houston (6th) and Philly (9th).

Thus is the tale of the once and future Crew. I wrote a lot about it earlier this year:

The Crew are only three games away from the middle of the season. More of this to come. I know it's dabbling a bit in the dark arts but I think there are a lot of things here that are valuable. Thanks for reading.